In the ongoing struggle for consumer Photo editing software dominance, I have picked a particularly simple task to illustrate the differences between Picasa and iPhoto: Renaming pictures. Most cameras auto name your pictures sequentially based on some prefix you may or may not have provided. These names mean nothing to humans, which causes a list view of pictures to be completely useless... Useless that is, unless you choose to rename those pictures which have some significance.

Picasa

Let's see how Picasa goes about renaming pictures.

1st choice- Right Click

There is no Rename button immediately visible in Picasa, so I choose the picture I want to rename and right click. There are quite a few options- check out the picture, but Rename is nowhere to be found. Interesting. Must be in here somwhere...

2nd choice- Menu Item

Well since right-clicking didn't do the trick, I'll just mosey on over to the "Picture" menu and find the Rename command there. What? It's not there either. Not in the right-click menu, and not in the Picture menu. Must be somewhere. There's a properties panel for each image- must be that- like iTunes.

3rd choice- Properties

Incredibly, these are read only properties and there is no rename functionality here either. I haven't been able to find rename in Picasa for quite some time (45 seconds- nearly 45 minutes in earth time). If someone knows how to rename pictures in Picasa, could you please let me know and I'll post the secret here.

iPhoto 

Let's take a look at Apple's iPhoto and see if it can handle the renaming pictures test.